Group 2 : Morocco’s educational system
Introduction
During my life in Morocco, I have always been told how great of a nation we were in all aspects. Education was one of them, and one common standard was to depict us as excellent in mathematics, without any real proof of that. Until recently, this is the first result that you could find on Internet while typing “Moroccans are good at mathematics”. We excel, how wonderful is this!
However, growing up, I realized that the poverty I was surrounded by depicted a deep-rooted defect in education. In 2018, the OECD proposed Morocco to take the PISA test, which measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge to meet real-life challenges.This is what happened:
The result is clear : “PISA : Moroccan students have poor reading, Math, Science abilities”. This picture shows that data can radically transform the paradigms and beliefs underlying a whole education system. It is time for Morocco to adopt a data-driven approach to solve institutional problems, especially in education. We need to fix our system’s chronic dysfunctions because they result in an exorbitant cost that the country bears in setting up its education system and an uncertain future for learners.
We need to visualize data in a truthful and enlightening way (Alberto Cairo’s principles) in order to get out of this collective blindness. Let us understand where we truly stand.
Literacy rate
The big picture
First, we start with the most basic indicator of a country’s education : Literacy Rate.
It is clear that Morocco is far behind the rest of the world. But is the situation really bad? Are the means allocated to increasing the literacy rate sufficient?
Zoom on generations
> The picture is now clearer : Morocco’s literacy rate is driven down by the older generation. This generation was indeed rural based and had less access to schools. Moreover, Morocco’s education was mainly based on Quran (read by professors) rather than academic programs such as we know them today.We also notice a drastic reduction in gender gap, which further proves that the situation of literacy rate in Morocco is actually improving a lot more than we initially thought!
Understand the country’s evolution
How did we reach this point? Why is the youth literacy rate so high today?
Before diving too much into details, let us recall a few facts and definitions :
Primary school: Age 6 to 11
Lower secondary school : Age 12 to 15
Net enrolment rate in primary school : The number of pupils of official primary school age who are enrolled in primary education as a percentage of the total children of the official school age population
Completion rate in primary school : The proportion of enrolled primary school pupils that complete primary school.
Lower secondary school drop-out rate : The cumulative drop-out rate until the last grade of lower secondary school.
Net enrolment rate and completion rate for primary schools have sharply increased since 1970. The main decrease happened in 1987, when the minister of education Dr.Azzedine Laraki imposed the arabization and islamization of academic programs. Furthermore, King Hassan II ordered to remove philosophy and sociology from all programs in order to better control population. This had an abrupt effect on primary school enrolment and completion rate, but the situation came back to normal in the early 1990’s. Nearly all kids are now enrolled in primary school and complete it, which explains why the youth literacy rate is so high compared to the older generation.
The lower secondary school drop-out rate has not improved at all during the last 40 years. Moroccan 15 years old students know how to read and write since they went to primary school. However, can they use their abilities to meet real-life challenges? How well can they use their reading,science and mathematics skills in real settings? This is exactly what the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests for.
PISA scores
Histogram
The high youth literacy rate is very positive, but it is clearly not enough to assert that Morocco’s educational system is great. The country underperforms on all PISA subjects compared to the rest of the world, indicating that even though 15 years old students are literate, they still struggle to use their skills to meet real-life challenges because too many of them have dropped out before the last year of lower secondary school.
Map visualization
We also generated relevant map visualizations using R in combination with Tableau.
We want to zoom on Morocco’s performance and visualize the whole world in more details. We will base our investigation on the average PISA scores (as average, we consider the average of mathematics, science and reading scores).
On the map, we can see that Moroccans’ average performance isn’t good. As benchmarks against which we can compare Morocco’s performance, we have highlighted worst and best performing countries, Dominican Republic and China, respectively. Morocco’s average score is 367.9 compared to Dominican Republic’s 334.1 and China’s 579. Morocco was ranked 75th out of 78 countries to take the PISA test.
After understanding Morocco’s performance in comparison to the rest of the world, we want to further explore the variables that we assumed would contribute to the country’s performance or underperformance. Primary and secondary education are interesting variables to consider since people taking the PISA scores are young high school students (15 and 16 year old).
Therefore, we’re going to zoom on net enrolment in primary and secondary education and compare Morocco’s numbers with the rest of the world’s.
This map tells us how Morocco’s net primary enrolment rate compares to other countries’. We can observe that all high performing countries in PISA also have very high net primary enrolment rates. This confirms that the key to the Morocco’s underperformance in PISA tests is not linked to primary education enrolment rates. Let’s investigate net secondary enrolment rates!
On the map, we can observe the world countries’ net secondary enrolment rate. Particularly, we can see that Morocco has a low net secondary enrolment rate of only 63.47%. Some other low-performing countries such as Dominican Republic and Panama also have low enrolment rates. In contrast, high-performing countries such as Canada and Finland have very high net secondary enrolment rates, close to 100%.
We can conclude that, unlike net primary enrolment rate, net secondary enrolment rate is generally different for high and low performing countries: countries that performed badly tend to have a significantly lower net secondary enrolment rate than countries that performed well.
So far, we have showed that youth literacy rate was high and that PISA scores were extremely low. Should Morocco be content of this achievement? How are other countries doing in terms of youth literacy rate?
Youth literacy.. A real achievement?
Unexpectedly, there isnt a 1-1 linear relationship between GDP per capita and Youth literacy rate. We can we see that there is a sharp increase in literacy rate when the GDP per capita increases up to $2500, this already leads to an almost 100% literacy rate already. We believe that this could be due to the easier accessibility to technology and learning materials, so it would be expected that there is a high youth literacy nowadays.
Even though we mentioned that Morocco had a very high youth literacy rate, this achievement might simply not be an indicator that the situation of the education system is good. Virtually all countries that crossed the threshold have a similar level of youth literacy rate, so Morocco should now really focus on improving real-life skills. But how can they do it? Is GDP per capita an important factor?
Factors to improve education
GDP per capita
Let us now visualize if GDP per capita really has an influence on PISA scores.
Above we can see that while GDP per capita clearly plays a role in the PISA scores, it appears there are other factors that influence the outcome. We can see certain countries such as Vietnam (which has a similar GDP per capita to Morocco) has exceptional outcomes. The same is true for China which is highly successful given their GDP per capita. On the flipside we have Luxembourg who perform worse than almost all countries with over 35000 GDP per capita. It is clear there are other strong factors that play a role in the educational outcomes of each country.
Secondary school enrolment
Our map on net secondary enrolment showed that there could be a link between this factor and PISA scores. Let us visualize this relationship.
When looking at PISA score and net enrollment for secondary education, Morocco is at the end of the spectrum when compared to the whole world. Secondary education seems to have much of a greater impact on the pupil’s ability to do well in the PISA test - mathematics, science and reading abilities. Secondary school capabilities is directly related to the PISA score because the test takers are in the 15 year old range children. As a result, Morocco should have to try and boost their net enrollment rate in secondary education on the first stage to improvement in PISA scores.
Overview on Vietnam
As mentioned earlier, Vietnam has performed very well despite a low GDP per capita.We also decided to include the healthcare data into our report because we have realised that the country’s healthcare system has an influence on students staying in school and going to school on a regular basis. It would be as simple as having vaccines for the influenza season because there has been a study saying that for every 100 children during flu season, which included 37 school days, an excess of 28 illness episodes and 63 missed school days occured. However, we see that this does not apply to Vietnam, which they spend much less in healthcare. This could be because neighbouring countries such as Thailand and Phillipines have very good healthcare and share medical knowledge/resources with them. This does not apply to Morocco, so we looked at a similar country landscape like Belarus, and concluded that reaching a higher PISA score might also involve improving our healthcare system.
As a last step, we contacted the ministry of education and asked them what was their strategy for the next 20 years. The minister indicated that Morocco would focus on early education (kindergarten) and lower secondary education. He asked us to check if this strategy made sense from a statistical point of view, so we ran a regression : average PISA scores ~ GDP per capita, lower secondary enrolment rate and early education enrolment rate.
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = mean_read_score ~ GDP_per_cap + early_ed_rate +
## lower_sec_enrolment_rate, data = model_data)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -91.860 -22.889 -0.357 19.819 76.332
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 2.107e+02 2.823e+01 7.462 3.50e-11 ***
## GDP_per_cap 7.037e-04 1.491e-04 4.720 7.84e-06 ***
## early_ed_rate 1.412e+00 1.606e-01 8.792 5.05e-14 ***
## lower_sec_enrolment_rate 1.334e+00 3.442e-01 3.875 0.000193 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 32.48 on 98 degrees of freedom
## (276 observations deleted due to missingness)
## Multiple R-squared: 0.6681, Adjusted R-squared: 0.658
## F-statistic: 65.76 on 3 and 98 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16The result was very convincing : all variables were significant. Thus, we believe that even though GDP per capita is an important factor, Vietnam has shown that it was not the only possible way to improve PISA scores. We just proved that lower secondary enrolment rate and early education enrolment rate were very important variables too. Basically, Morocco needs to find a way to teach sooner (early education) or to teach longer (secondary education).
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the country needs to set a data-driven strategy for the next 20 years in order to monitor educational reforms and improve the system. We proved that GDP is not the only factor that counts, and that the country’s strategy should primarily focus on early education and lower-secondary education for the future of the country.
Thank you for reading our project, and as a final word…
